Question

I have a question for a school project. How do I do an action when somebody’s session gets ended. For instance, I want to delete a file that says a user is logged in when his session ends. If he closes the browser or if he doesn’t do any request for a while?

Answer 1

You can do so by writing a custom session handler.

On this site you’ll find a proper explanation:

http://phpmaster.com/writing-custom-session-handlers/

However, be aware that ‘garbage collection’ (cleaning up the file as you want to do) does NOT take place directly after the session was closed!

Php uses a setting ‘session.gc_probability’ that indicates that once every XXX requests, PHP will look for old/closed sessions and start to do garbage-collection

http://www.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.gc-probability